An Optimal Linear Attack Strategy on Remote State Estimation

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal linear attack strategy for remote state estimation that maximizes estimation error while maintaining stealthiness, providing bounds on attack effectiveness and aiding in defense development.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized linear attack method that surpasses existing strategies in causing estimation performance loss under stealth constraints.

Findings

Proposed attack outperforms recent linear strategies in simulation.

Provides a bound on the tradeoff between attack impact and stealthiness.

Numerical examples validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

This work considers the problem of designing an attack strategy on remote state estimation under the condition of strict stealthiness and $\epsilon$-stealthiness of the attack. An attacker is assumed to be able to launch a linear attack to modify sensor data. A metric based on Kullback-Leibler divergence is adopted to quantify the stealthiness of the attack. We propose a generalized linear attack based on past attack signals and the latest innovation. We prove that the proposed approach can obtain an attack that can cause more estimation performance loss than linear attack strategies recently studied in the literature. The result thus provides a bound on the tradeoff between available information and attack performance, which is useful in the development of mitigation strategies. Finally, some numerical examples are given to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy.